Fix terminal title after SSH remote logging to another machine

Solution: add some functions ~/.bashrc to do something after ssh and su commands

function title()
{
   # change the title of the current window or tab
   echo -ne "\033]0;$*\007"
}

function ssh()
{
   /usr/bin/ssh "$@"
   # revert the window title after the ssh command
   title $USER@$HOST
}

function su()
{
   /bin/su "$@"
   # revert the window title after the su command
   title $USER@$HOST
}

Note: restart bash after edits to ~/.bashrc

Example:

# title is "user1@boxA"
ssh boxB  # auto changes title while on boxB to "user1@boxB"
exit
# title returns back to "user1@boxA" because of our title call in ssh()
su - user2 # auto changes title while switched user to user2: "user2@boxA"
exit
# title returns back to "user1@boxA" because of our title call in su()

Hope that helps.

I don't know about window titles, but I have been trying to have my system do something on terminating a ssh session—actually, after terminating a ssh session. In short: it doesn't work like that. Basically you have three choices:

1. Write a wrapper around ssh, i.e., an executable shell script named ssh that takes precedence over /usr/bin/ssh in your $PATH which contains the line exec /usr/bin/ssh $@ somewhere in its middle. This enables you to have your shell do some stuff before and after the effective ssh binary is run, while keeping th eoverhead to a minimum.

2. Write a patch against the SSH sources of your choice to provide you a cleanup hook that executes a shell command passed via commandline or some config-setting. That's what we want.

3. Have PROMPT_COMMAND evaluate the output of history. Basically a more generic and more ugly approach to 1.

Configure your local shell dotfile (e.g. $PROMPT_COMMAND in ~/.bashrc) to set the terminal title appropriately, using the same mechanism.

For example:

export PROMPT_COMMAND="printf '\e]0;bash\7\n'"